But this is, fundamentally, the point of "Free" software: someone who uses a piece of software should be entitled to change that software as they desire. This obviously implies that if you make your own modified software available to others, they too must be able to make their own changes.

The unfortunate reality of drug addiction is that even for people who want out it’s very hard. For people who don’t, it’s quite a lot harder. If there was a magic pill that cured addiction I think we might make different policy choices, but given that there isn’t I don’t see how your plan can really work.

Also, there are housing assistance programs for everyone who makes less than a certain amount of money, and I think everyone who advocates for more housing for the homeless would agree with more affordable housing in general. Mostly people who work in this space agree that housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness.

In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.

If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.

Homelessness is primarily a function of housing costs, so I'd suggest the land value tax is a lot more relevant than you think.

This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the homelessness problem.

Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work requirements is not simple. And I think you need some evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.

As the OP points out, a lot of what happens now is an artifact of the history of how these things have developed, and about which things were prioritized over the years. Many of these choices made sense at the time but may no longer be necessary, and some things were definitely lost in the process.

When we were developing Cappuccino, which includes its own transpiled to JS language (possibly the first such general purpose language), one of our important goals was making sure the compiler could run in the browser itself so no external build tools were needed; everything worked just dragging index.html in the browser and writing code in